Endangered Gray Wolves Were Poisoned in

 After investigators in Washington state discovered four dead gray wolves in February, they started to dig deeper. Within a month, they’d identified two more wolves that were dead in the area. State officials announced last week that all six wolves had been poisoned.

“This incident is quite large in scale compared to prior poaching, with six wolves killed in a relatively short time frame,” Becky Elder, a spokesperson for the Washington State Fish and Wildlife Service, said Tuesday, as reported by the New York Times’ Derrick Bryson Taylor. Elder chose not to give specifics on the type of poison or how it was administered, per the .